The Menace of Manchester

On our journey from York to Manchester, an announcement was made that the train would be terminating at Manchester-Piccadilly due to service being completed on the lines and would NOT be continuing to Man-Airport, which is where we were to get off. The announcement also noted that we were to go to the main entrance to find busses to take us to our final destination. We left the station as directed and quickly found a queue (line) of nearly 500 people waiting for a bus to the airport station. We stood there for nearly 45 minutes and in that time only one charter bus came to pick up anyone. The same bus finally returned and was loading a second group of passengers when someone shouted that there was a train at platform 2 that would take us to the airport. So there was a mad rush of those nearly 500 people making their way to platform 2, all of with luggage and when we got there, they wouldn’t let on us on the train because the conductor had not arrived yet. There was a lot of confusion because another train was ahead of the supposed train headed for the airport and no one was certain which train was the one that we needed to board. We were finally allowed on the 2nd train and we all hoped for the best as we piled in. On our short journey, a man wanted to bring a food/beverage trolley through and was mad that aisles were full of luggage and began trying to shuffle things around to make room. We all just looked at him, like, “what do you expect?” and we were pleased to find that soon we had arrived at the airport station.

Again pride, and the lack of Wi-Fi, was our downfall as we could not determine if the hotel we were staying at had shuttle service. It seemed that every other hotel within the vicinity had a free shuttle that would make a regular circle round to pick anyone up, but not the Holiday Inn. Luckily Andy got frustrated enough with me trying to find internet service that he found a place to call the hotel to arrange for shuttle service. I called and the woman asked how many people would need transportation and if I wanted to pay the driver up front or at the hotel, and I told her at the hotel, that way I could put everything on my card. She said that the driver would come by and shout our surname (last name) so we needed to be sure we were outside waiting. Sure enough a shuttle arrived 15 minutes later and our surname was shouted. The driver loaded our things into the back of the van and as we settled into our seats, he asked for a ticket. I told him that we did not have a ticket; that we had called on the phone inside the station to make arrangements to be picked up. He said that would be fine and we went on to pick up another group of people before heading off to our hotel. When we arrived, the driver unloaded our bags and said to both of us, "have a good rest of your trip".

We went inside the hotel and checked in before heading to our room to get settled. It was a nice room, each of us with a single bed and a nice sized bathroom. Andy & I took a look at the many menus that were provided in our room and decided to go downstairs to take a look at what was available. It was strange because there were three separate menus for room service, the lounge/bar, and the restaurant, though the all had nearly the same items. We decided to eat in the lounge because we had our hearts set on pizza and it wasn't offered in the restaurant, so we went up to order at the bar. Vilma, a woman with a strong accent, clearly did not know what was going on despite the fact she worked there, and somehow managed to take our order and payment. We ordered a lot of food, but it was our last real meal that'd have for awhile. We ordered a Caesar Salad, Garlic Bread, Gardeneria pizza (Bree) and a 3 meat pizza (Andy). Instead of going to get proper change, she gave me £5 in coins (on my last night in England, and my bag is weighed down by the amount of 50p coins in my change purse! Vilma also forgot to ask for our drink order, so Andy ordered those separately. We went and sat down and Vilma brought us our food, each time announcing what it was in her thick accent and as she handed Andy his pizza she said, "Here your perroni pizza". Perroni pizza? PEPPERoni is a topping, but wow!

As we enjoyed our dinner, a little girl went prancing by shouting, “I love Sausage, I love Sausage” as her mother sat idly by when she realized that her children were outside. Luckily her husband was attending to them. Soon she returned with her twin brother who was just as wound up. Throughout the rest of the night we caught glimpses of them and Andy and I both prayed that they were not staying next door to us! After eating our fill (we each saved 2 pieces of pizza for breakfast in the morning), we decided to try out our phone card and much to our dismay, it STILL did not work. Our next move was to use the internet in the lobby area to print out our boarding passes for our flight the next day. We had to pay £15 for a limited amount of time, but we figured it would be worth it to have the paper passes instead of worrying about getting them on our phones. We logged in and every time we went to print the boarding pass, it would log us out, but finally we got to the page we needed and then the computer would not recognize the printer it was connected to! Our time was running out, so I sent Andy to go check at the front desk to see what could be done. They said they would send someone over. Finally, the most competent individual working for Holiday Inn Express in Manchester arrived and after realizing that the second printer would not work as well, she invited us into her office, oh yea, she’s the general manager, where we were finally able to get them printed off.

After that fiasco, we took a short walk around the hotel, where we saw a cigarette bin with an “out of order” sign because birds had built a nest inside of it! We decided we had seen it all and so we went back to our room to relax. We watched some TV before breaking down and spending £7 for Wi-Fi in the room, so we could Skype with mom and dad. It was nice to see them and realize that they DID remember that they’d need to pick us up at the airport the following day since mom kept saying the 25th instead of the 23rd. We rested easier after speaking to them and were able to get some sleep.